Neo-Ottomanists and neoconservatives: a strange alignment in the 1990s.

• Author: Mufti, Malik
• Position: Report

In a curious episode overlooked by the scholarly literature, the ambitions of two Near Eastern leaders generally viewed as conventionally conservative, King Hussein of Jordan and Turgut Ozal of Turkey, aligned during the 1990s with the interests of a group of influential American and Israeli policy hawks to press for a radical redrawing of the regional political and territorial map. That such a revisionist agenda should arise during the 1990s is not in itself surprising, for this was a time of great upheaval, precipitated in part by broader developments such as the end of the oil boom and the collapse of communism. Politically, long-entrenched authoritarian regimes in the Near East came under unprecedented challenge. Territorially, a substantial number of new entities--Iraqi Kurdistan, Somaliland, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Kosovo, Palestine- emerged exhibiting (for a while at least, in some cases) a measure of real autonomy that fell short of recognition as sovereign states. Such developments revealed the growing strains on the regional political order created and sustained by the great powers after the Ottoman Empire's collapse in World War I.

The significance of this episode therefore lies beyond its curiosity value. Hussein and Ozal deployed realpolitik on behalf of a revisionist enterprise that sought to transcend the parameters of the post-WWI status quo--parameters they viewed as constricting or diminishing-in pursuit of a grander imperial vision. In doing so, they appealed both to a broader, more cosmopolitan political identity (a "greater asabiyya," to use Ibn Khaldun's terms) of the kind that sustained the Ottoman and earlier Islamic empires, and to the democratic norms that are increasingly constitutive of political legitimacy. As such, their initiatives constitute an early signal of the current regional identity crisis, reflect the variability of political legitimacy during times of extraordinary flux, present an alternative to the prescriptions of Islamist militants and liberal modernists alike, and highlight the urgency of the quest for viable alternatives to a collapsing status quo--an urgency that has only intensified since the 1990s.

King Hussein

On March 11, 1924, the Hashemite Sharif Hussein, custodian of the holy sites in Mecca and Medina and ruler of Hijaz until his ouster by the Saudis later that year, proclaimed himself Caliph of all Islam. His declared aim was to pick up the mantle of the Ottoman caliphate, which had just been abolished by the Turkish republicans, and by extension that of the Abbasids and Umayyads all the way back to the founding of the Islamic polity by his ancestor the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein's proclamation, and its near-total dismissal by Western powers and local nationalists alike, is emblematic of the modern Hashemite project as a whole.

In pursuit of this project the Hashemites proved willing to deal with anyone wielding real power. Sharif Hussein's sons Abdullah and Faisal accordingly accepted British offers to assume the thrones of Transjordan and Iraq respectively--in order to establish beach-heads for more expansive initiatives such as Abdullah's Greater Syria and Faisal's Fertile Crescent unification plans--even though the creation of the two states was itself popularly viewed as a Western betrayal of pan-Arab nationalism. They also sought to come to terms with the Zionist movement, despite widespread Arab hostility and charges of collaboration with the enemy. The Hashemites appealed to realism, Jordan's King Hussein arguing in a foreword to his grandfather Abdullah's memoirs that his family's "criterion in [...] every judgement is whether what they are seeking is feasible and attainable or not." In Palestine, Abdullah "had perceived the Zionist iceberg and its dimensions [...] His tactics and strategy were therefore attuned to circumventing and minimizing the possible consequences of a head-on collision. Others saw only the tip, and their responses were over-confidence, inflexibility, and outright complacency." Such was Hussein's defense, self-serving to be sure but compelling nevertheless, of the Hashemite proposition that "Morality and power-politics do not, in most instances, match." (1)

What the Hashemites hoped to achieve, then, was as comprehensive a reversal of the fragmentation of the region as realistically possible. "From his father," Avi Shlaim writes, Abdullah "inherited the belief in Arab greatness, the yearning to revive the glory of its past, and the vision of a mighty Hashemite empire and caliphate." (2) Abdullah lamented the splintering of the Ottoman "Imperial Caliphate" into narrower "racial" entities: "It is true that the Turks are today stronger than before, better organized and more progressive, but where is the fame and influence they once had, when their Sultan was Commander of the Faithful?" (3) Although practical constraints obliged him to focus his acquisitive energies on Greater Syria and the Hijaz, accordingly, he never stopped looking farther afield: "It is my hope that from now on we shall see these things come to pass and, if God so wills, form federations from Pakistan in the southeast to Edirne in the northwest and from the borders of Tibet in the east to Tangier in the west." (4)

Such an outlook is congruent with the worldview of an ambitious prince whose father was born in Istanbul and married a grand-daughter of one of the most eminent Ottoman statesmen, and who himself lived in Istanbul between the ages of eleven and twenty-seven and then again as a deputy for Mecca in the Ottoman parliament during the years leading up to World War I. In his memoirs Abdullah vividly evokes the imperial capital as "fascinating beyond description, a city of great beauty enthralling in every season [...] [A]s the traditional seat of the Caliphate it gathered a multitude of different people--Turks and Arabs, Kurds and Circassians, Albanians and Bulgarians, Egyptians and Sudanese. It contains Muslims of every walk of life, of different fashions and tongues, yet nobody and nothing seem strange and you can find anything you want from any country." (5) This is an imperial worldview, expansive but also cosmopolitan and accommodating.

Still, the Hashemite prince encountered one disappointment after another. Although both the British and the Zionists had at various points considered ways of "Arabizing" the Palestine problem within a broader regional framework (with David Ben-Gurion going so far as to contemplate in 1934 an "association" between an independent Jewish state and an Arab federation), ultimately neither had any interest in the kind of meaningful consolidation of Arab power envisaged by the Hashemites. (6) Even after Abdullah gained control of the West Bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem in the 1948 war--his single, and temporary, acquisition- Israel's leaders refused to conclude a peace agreement that would recognize his annexation of the Palestinian territories. Avi Shlaim describes their attitude: "There was always a tendency among them to underrate and belittle Abdullah, but as their power and self-confidence increased, so did their disregard for him, a revealing example of which was Ben-Gurion's refusal to meet him face to face." (7) As for British officials, Abdullah's pursuit of unification with Syria provoked an exasperation that led one of them to muse: "It is very difficult to know what place we can find for him in the post-war Near East, and if he plays the fool and gives us an excuse to eliminate his dynasty, so much the better." (8)

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Such, at any rate, was the worldview of the man his grandson King Hussein would call "the greatest single influence on my life." (9) Abdullah met his death at the hands of an assassin on July 20, 1951, while attending Friday prayers at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Hussein, who stood next to him and barely survived himself, later recalled how the sight of his grandfather's attendants fleeing in all directions revealed to him "the frailty of political devotion" and left him with a disillusioned if more realistic outlook: "it was his death which taught me the ultimate lesson [...] that brought me face to face with myself and made me clarify my philosophy of life for the first time." (10) Many years later he told an interviewer who asked whether he ever confided in his wife on matters of state: "There is no one in the world with whom I can discuss problems frankly. The burden is too big, and I am prepared to bear it alone. That is how it is, that is how I am." (11) Hussein's own revisionist agenda would later be shaped by this grim view of human nature.

In terms of foreign policy, however, the expansionist component of Hussein's Hashemite legacy would remain dormant for many years, eclipsed by the popularity of Nasserist and Ba'thist nationalism. That dormancy began to pass with the 1967 debacle, allowing him to float proposals such as his 1972 "United Arab Kingdom" plan for the reunification of Jordan and the West Bank, and his 1986 development plan for the occupied territories, both of which however once again failed to overcome Israeli and Palestinian opposition. Only in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, did the time finally seem ripe for a more radical reassertion of the Hashemite vision.

Hussein's initial response to the crisis was a surprisingly vigorous attack on the proposed American intervention, often explained as appeasing the proIraqi sentiments of his citizens. It is possible, however, to discern a sequence of reactions that indicate a more proactive effort to capitalize on this upheaval. Hussein's first major theme was the looming danger posed by predatory foreign powers. In a speech to the Arab summit in Cairo on August 11, he warned of "plans" to strike "a blow against Iraq to [...] weaken it and [...] liquidate it as a promising power" as a prelude to seizing the "oil...